Before the Rooster Crows Twice

They have sung and walked out of the city into the dark, and this is what he says on the road. You will all fall away. Not some of you, and not the weaker ones. All of you. He says it as a plain fact, walking along, to men who had left everything they owned for the sake of walking there. Then he says why, and he takes the words from Zechariah.

I will strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.

It matters who is speaking in that line, because the one saying I will strike is God. So the scattering is not a surprise and the striking is not an accident of history. What is about to be done to Jesus by soldiers and priests is also being done by God, on purpose, and Jesus is the one saying so on the walk over. Isaiah had drawn the same thing from the other end, with all of us like sheep gone astray, each turning to his own way, and the LORD laying on him the iniquity of us all. That is heavy, and it is meant to be. Then, before anybody has had the chance to answer him, he says this.

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.

He has just told them they are going to abandon him, and the next thing out of his mouth is where to meet. He is counting on there being an afterwards. He is counting on them being in it.

Peter will not have it. Even if everyone else falls away, he says, he never will. He means it, and it is not bravado, but there is something ugly underneath it that he probably did not hear himself say, which is that they might and he is different. Jesus answers with a level of detail that must have sounded almost cruel: this night, before the rooster crows twice, three denials.

Peter keeps insisting. He would die with him, he says, before he would deny him. And then Mark adds the line that stops this being a story about one weak man.

And all the others said the same thing.

Every man on that road made the promise. Every man on that road ran.